


Yours

by sable_tyger (orphan_account)



Category: Sherlock Holmes (2009)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-28
Updated: 2011-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-28 07:43:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/305494
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/sable_tyger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Holmes almost does not survive Reichenbach, and Watson realizes that Holmes was expecting that all along. <em>Holmes/Watson, Watson/Mary, Holmes/Irene</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	Yours

_We have lingered in the chambers of the sea  
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown  
Till human voices wake us, and we drown._

(“The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” by T.S. Eliot)

+

He almost chooses not to come back.

Falling, his eyes closed, Watson’s face like the ghost of a photograph on his eyelids, Holmes imagines what it would be like to drown—lungs seizing, a few brief seconds of pain like acid in his chest, and then silence, calm, as the water drags him down—and he thinks _that wouldn’t be so bad, would it._

Moriarty’s hands fist in the front of Holmes’ jacket, his knuckles hard-angled and sharp-edged, each one a blade cutting against the frosty swath of mist rising from Reichenbach’s turbulent waters. Moriarty twitches, suddenly, and then his whole body seizes—Holmes knows it more than he feels it in the sudden jerk of Moriarty’s elbows; he’s been expecting it ever since he swung backwards over empty space and dragged Moriarty down with him. They fall and Moriarty succumbs to the throes of cardiac arrest, his heart stuttering and then stopping; he is dead before they even hit the water.

A shock through Holmes’ entire body, and the water thunders above him now, a thousand hollow empty drums. The icy cold is in all his limbs. It follows the blood in his veins back up to his heart and he has a choice to make now, doesn’t he, a choice he has been unable to answer ever since he first realized the question. He’d crafted himself a way out regardless, of course—had always made sure that there was a possibility of survival, no matter how Moriarty tried to change the game. It is a habit more than anything else, a deep-seated survival instinct that he played to only because it was familiar, like the touch of his violin beneath his jaw as he bends over its strings, the bow crooked in his hand and hovering just above the first note in that impossibly weighted moment before the instrument begins to sing; and now he waits in that same moment, between the two hemispheres of life and death, and he wonders whether that ancient instinct can be overridden by logic and rationality—whether it can be undone by necessity.

A few heartbeats of time and his lungs are already icicles in his chest, stabbing at his ribs and the space just between his collarbones, right at his throat; the ice tears its way behind his eyes. If he opens his mouth his lungs will fill with water and his heart will stutter a staccato against each of his ribs, one-by-one-by-one, and he will no longer feel the cold.

He opens his mouth.

But instead of water, oxygen fills his lungs, sweet and desperate, and the pain in his chest lessens; he kicks and strikes back against the deafening water, the surface so far away, the water so cold; he might die yet, but now he is fighting it and the horrible desperation overwhelms him, his free hand clawing at the swirling currents, his legs thrashing beyond his control, his brother’s oxygen supply pressed to his lips.

He breaches the surface and it roars in his ears. His lungs swell and spasm as he chokes on breath and claws his way to the shore before his muscles fail him in the cold.

In the end, he is a selfish bastard after all, but not in the way Watson believes.

+

“I don’t know how to dance,” Watson says, and for a moment Holmes just stares at him. Watson is pink-faced, embarrassed, and his gaze never quite meets Holmes’, instead skirting around the edges of his face as if it would hurt to look him directly in the eye.

Of course Watson cannot dance. It surprises Holmes that he is even surprised by this. Somehow, he feels, he should have known.

“I haven’t said anything to Mary yet,” Watson continues, still not looking at Holmes. “But she said that at the wedding—well, couples dance, and….”

And it makes sense that this is how this would happen—that Watson would ask to dance because he does not know how and he needs to know how, for his wedding. For Mary, who is all glittering beautiful smiles and eyes that are too bright and too knowing for her own good; who will know Watson better than Holmes does in a few short years, and it is ridiculous to feel jealousy if only because Watson was never his to have. You cannot possess that to which you have laid no claim.

Holmes entertains the idea of saying no. Not to doom Watson to embarrassment at his reception—he has other friends who can teach him to dance, surely—but because to say anything else is to only further perpetuate the impossible circle in which Holmes has trapped himself. A labyrinth with no beginning and no end and shadows dark as tobacco smoke between smooth pale teeth.

He does not say no.

Instead, he holds out a hand that does not shake and says, with a smile that feels almost sincere, “Well, we can’t have you embarrassing Mary on her wedding day, can we?”

He should teach Watson how to lead, if he were truly trying to show him how to dance with Mary; instead Holmes curls his arm around Watson’s waist and looks down at his feet as if he needs to do so in order to focus and not because he simply cannot look at Watson’s face in this moment, and he slides his foot forward first. Watson’s hands are heavy and light on Holmes’ sides, but Watson is silent, as voiceless as Holmes feels. There is no music; Holmes has always been able to compose in his head. He does not know what melody Watson hears, but wherever Holmes leads, Watson follows as he has always done, perfectly in tempo and never so much as missing a step.

The dance ends, and Holmes lets his hands fall. Watson’s linger for a moment, perhaps taken by surprise at last, and then he too pulls away.

“You sell yourself short, old boy,” Holmes says. “You dance quite well.”

He looks up and is momentarily stunned by the mixture of emotion on Watson’s face, always so easy for him to read. This is the first time Holmes has ever seen anguish there, mingled with something almost like an apology, unspoken and weighing as heavily as a long-held confession.

Watson’s face goes perfectly calm and still before Holmes can read any more, everything else swept away by the characteristically seamless composure of a man who once had none. “Holmes,” he says, or might have said, but Holmes has already bowed low and taken his leave.

+

Watson writes a eulogy for Holmes’ funeral. In truth, he writes several eulogies, because each attempt feels more empty and untrue than the last, as if he is saying less with every word.

What he wants to write are the things he remembers to be true and real: the wet metal smell of blood, coppery and sweet; the harsh-gasoline burn of adrenaline and terror in his veins like an anesthetic; the sum of conversations unsaid, which somehow always came to more than their parts; the memories that didn’t hurt so much as ache because of old mistakes and promises never made, but meant.

What he writes are the things he supposes must be said, at a funeral of this sort: _he was the best and the wisest man whom I have ever known,_ and the truth of that is its untruth, because there was nothing perfect about Holmes. It was the sum of his imperfections that made him so remarkable, that inseparable dichotomy between what he was and what he pretended to be.

What Watson actually says at the funeral is nothing, because he finds that he cannot speak; others do so instead, and Watson curls around himself in a darker corner of the church, wondering whether any of this would have meant something to Holmes; whether the promise of God and heaven would have comforted him or irritated him; whether the last thought in his head as he’d died had been _please let me live_ or _please let him be safe now_ ; whether Watson had factored into the equation at all, in the end, or been struck from both sides as when a student first learns to take scholastic pleasure in simplification, the removal of all that is excess.

The funeral ends, and Simza finds him before Mary does, perhaps because Mary is not looking for him.

“That was a beautiful service,” Simza says, her voice husky—with grief or exhaustion, Watson cannot tell. He does not really care. The church is emptying around them, like blood draining from a wound. If he doesn’t pay attention, he can smell that sick, sweet scent of decay all around him, even here.

Simza pulls her long cloak around herself, shrugging her shoulders into it as if retreating from the world. Her eyes, deep in her face above smooth cheekbones, are dark storm clouds above a sea parted by bone-yellow stones.

“I am very sorry,” she says next. For the first time, Watson believes those words in a way he had not when they’d been spoken by anyone else. No one else had known the truth in the way that Simza had seen glimpses of it—on a dark, endless train ride, and in the curtained recesses of the opera house where Holmes had said _I was mistaken_ and the words were like steel, cold and unyielding.

Watson speaks, though he finds it difficult. “As am I. René did not deserve his fate.”

“Few of us do,” Simza says, with a half-bent smile. Watson thinks of Holmes, and Irene, and the men he had known in the war long ago, and he thinks, _yes, that’s right._ “But I believe, in the end, it could not have ended any differently for René. He was already dead before Moriarty had him killed. He was no longer my brother.”

She looks away for a moment, her eyes still dark but no longer wary. “I did not know Mr. Holmes for very long, nor very well,” she says slowly, as if each word presents a unique struggle. “But in the time that I did know him, he reminded me of my brother. So strongly at times that it shocked me.”

She does not go on, and Watson prompts her. “What do you mean?”

“They were both already dead, before death came to claim them.” Her gaze does not waver from Watson’s. He admires this about her; she has never looked away from what she has to do, never averted her gaze from that which pains her. He has never mastered that strength.

“He was full of much grief,” Simza finally says. “I knew it as soon as I met him. It did not consume him, nor was it what killed him, but it followed him day-by-day. I don’t think he ever knew how to let it go.”

She smiles—more completely now, despite the tears that are shining in her eyes. She clasps Watson’s hand to her chest, her own hands warm and small around his, before releasing him and stepping away.

“Your wife is very beautiful,” she says, before she is gone. “I wish you happiness.”

Watson never sees her again.

+

"Are you happy?” Holmes had asked him, and it really isn’t fair, is it, not a fair question at all. Are you happy here, or would you be happier with her?

Is it so wrong that he does not know the answer? He tells Holmes that he will not grace that question with a response, but in truth he has no answer, only wordless feelings that cannot be translated, propensities that make no sense to him, longings that he tells himself he does not really feel. Instead of answering, he focuses on the way that Holmes’ voice trembles, like the air before a storm—or, perhaps, like a rippling stitch of fabric in the wind, small and square like a handkerchief but not quite, because it meant so much more. A handkerchief bloodstained and musty and released, gently, into the English Channel, where it sank and the blood washed out into the sea.

Holmes’ voice shakes and what Watson wants to ask is “Are _you_ happy, Holmes?” because he knows that Holmes has not given himself time to grieve, nor allowed himself to even acknowledge that what he feels for Irene is grief—maybe that’s the simplest answer, distilled and clinically assessed and thereafter dismissed. Maybe it’s only part of it. But as for the rest of the equation, Watson cannot reconcile it; there’s pieces missing, here and there, that he cannot fill in.

(Are you happy, Watson?)

And as he’s picking through the rubble, looking for Holmes and praying that he has not killed him, Watson thinks— _no, I am not happy, I’m terrified and confused and scared and exuberant, I don’t know how to describe how I feel, and sometimes I think I’ve always felt this way but then I remember when I met you and how this all began, and I don’t know what I’m telling you, Holmes, but I am not happy._

+

  


He is so thankful for Mary, her steadfast presence. She does not have to speak to comfort him. A slender, smooth hand, cradled against his jaw; a cool brush of her mouth against his when he wakes at night and lies staring at the ceiling, not wanting to disturb her though he knows that he already has; her arms gentle but unyielding around him when he’d cried for the first time in longer than he cares to remember. Mary loves him, and that was simple once, and beautiful, and now—

And now, Watson worries that he does not deserve her; only it’s a relief, because he’s suspected that all along.

+

Holmes’ return trip to England is somber, quiet. Uneventful. He glories in it. For the first time in months he does not have to worry that Moriarty might be a step ahead of him; he does not have to worry anymore about losing the people he cares for.

Irene had loved him, he knows; in his own way, he had loved her. She was frighteningly intelligent, beautiful, and capable. He remembers her face well: the way a quirk of her mouth could hide a smile, the way a smile could hide a lie; her long lashes, feathering against the hollows of her eyes when she closed them; how she’d looked at him towards the end, when she realized that she was asking for something he could not give.

Her voice is more difficult to recall, and it slips away from him more as the days go by. He can easily remember the things that she said— _You’ll miss me, Sherlock_ —and even the way that she said them (flippantly, her words as smooth and rich as her favorite type of chocolate), but not the exact pitch of her voice, whether low or high, humorous or grave. This bothers him more than he’ll ever admit. He wishes he had kept her handkerchief, now. If only Irene were here to laugh with him at that.

 _I would never have guessed you were a romantic,_ Irene would say, and her eyes would glimmer with something like mischief; she might open her mouth to laugh, and her voice, her _voice—_

He grips the gunwale of the ferry with white-knuckled hands. The spray of the sea mists and foams around him as he watches the waves part before the bow of the boat. He doesn’t know what Irene had thought of the sea, but he believes that she had loved it, once; loved it for its hidden secrets, the glittering surface that bespoke of greater beauty underneath, the swell and shift of the tides. She was like the sea in that respect, for though Holmes had known most—if not all—of her secrets by the end, she had not surrendered them willingly. But he had prised them from her and counted them out like seashells, one-by-one, and it was only later that he realized the beauty of them, shining blue-white and beautiful in the dark ridges of sand by the sea.

He wishes he could have given her what she wanted. Even more, he wishes he could have gotten to her before Moriarty did—saved her, while he’d had the chance. He hadn’t believed Irene when she’d warned him about Moriarty. Not until it was too late.

+

Holmes arrives in London soon after to find that the newspapers have declared him dead—that a funeral was held, a few short days ago—that the city has grieved for him and moved on, ever onwards, as humanity is so inclined to do. He grips the newspaper and stares at the photograph _(an empty coffin, a rosary, and Watson’s face crumpled at the edges like paper, Mary on his arm)_ , and for a moment, he wonders.

He leaves the package for Watson to find (a message that Watson will surely understand: _I’m alive, Watson, and I’ll be back soon)_ , but he can’t reveal himself. He is not quite ready, yet.

+

Holmes’ fingers at Watson’s lapel, smoothing the front of his jacket before Watson will turn to face his bride, his wife-to-be. Holmes’ hands are as steady as they always are; it’s his voice that betrays him. The near-complete control that Holmes exerts over himself has its cracks, fragmented splinters in his perfectly crafted exterior. Hidden between the lies he tells to cover the truth and the half-truths he tells to cover the lies is the real truth, buried, but visible from the outside if one knows where to look.

Holmes says something then, something so quiet and unassuming and simple that if Watson hadn’t been centimeters from him, he would not have caught it: “Good luck.” And he smiles, but Watson can see right through him.

Holmes’ hands fall and he steps away. Torn—in ways that he finds hard to vocalize, between a man he loves and a woman he loves and the ways in which he thought those could not be the same—Watson lifts the veil from Mary’s face and then he kisses her and she is perfect, but something fractures, too, and falls away.

+

It’s like a punch in the stomach to open such an unassuming package, no return address, and find something so important inside. For a moment it feels as if Holmes has reached out from beyond the grave, whispered from a realm that should not be re-crossed—a place that Watson knows well, though he has never been.

Then Watson thinks, _no, that’s not what this is, this means Holmes is alive,_ but it’s wrong, quiet and unassuming and simple, and does Holmes think this small gesture will be enough to cross the enormous gulf that has widened between them in two short weeks, separated by the weight of Reichenbach Falls and a funeral, coming down around Watson’s ears? Holmes is alive, and yet—he is not here. And Watson does not see him for a long and weary time.

In those endless weeks, he receives several more—gifts, perhaps, but they’re more like letters, without the words and only the intent behind them remaining. Wine from Florence, excellently aged; a bound notebook from Bucharest, the pages smooth and empty and smelling faintly of Holmes’ tobacco, as if he’d considered the vacant pages too long _(smoke trailing from the corners of his mouth, his pipe crooked in the slant of his teeth as he exhales, slowly, and closes the notebook without marring a single page)_ ; a scrawled drawing of three figures standing before the low and cautious line of Athens against a torpid lazy sky. Dried flowers from who-knows-where, a box of slender pens and black, black ink, chocolate so sweet that it cannot be eaten—and a photograph, crumpled and worn around the edges but carefully preserved. Rubbed raw in the center, at the joining of two silhouettes, linked arms and splayed-wide fingers, their hats pulled low over their eyes—but _I know them from somewhere,_ Watson thinks, and he cannot recall why.

He locks these gifts and several more in the bottom left drawer of his desk, the one below where he keeps the last story he penned about Sherlock Holmes, London’s consulting detective, who is apparently content to remain dead and call from beyond the grave.

+

Moriarty is singing _Die Forelle_ above tinny strains of classical music that creak and gasp from the speakers above. The music is too loud and the music is strange, otherworldly, disturbing in its own right in this stark place beneath a pounding headache sky, and that is before Holmes starts to scream.

Holmes’ voice is a knife between Watson’s ribs, sliding effortlessly through straining muscle and tensing heart _(come at once if convenient)_ —look here, pay attention now, you have very little time. Watson’s hands are shaking and he hates Holmes in this moment, hates him so damn much, because Holmes knew this entire time, he _knew—_

(if inconvenient, come all the same)

—but Holmes screams again and Watson has no time to think about what Holmes knows, which is a lot, too much; he runs and then Holmes runs (are you happy, Watson?) and they run together and they don’t stop until they reach Reichenbach Falls and Holmes looks at Watson like he’s really seeing him for the first time, with his back against the only thing keeping him from tumbling into hundreds of tons of writhing water; and Watson can finally stop to think, but what he thinks is not _Holmes knew this would happen, Holmes wanted it this way,_ for that will come later—what he thinks is _no, please, don’t do this, don’t do this Holmes I beg of you._

Holmes closes his eyes, and then he’s gone. In the interminable seconds it takes Watson to cross the few meters between the doorway and the open space where Holmes had been, Watson realizes all the things he should have already known about Moriarty and Holmes. Moriarty does not leave loose ends—Irene is proof of that, unlucky to the last—and Watson has always been a loose end, that which Moriarty must snip if he were to defeat Holmes once and for all.

And so Holmes had traveled continents, crossed oceans, endured torture and suffering and near-death and now—oh God, and now water in his lungs and ears and mouth and death this time, in truth—to prevent that fate. Had done it for Watson, and Watson had not known, he had not seen.

The dark shapes that are Moriarty and Holmes swivel and sink into the rising spray of the falls, two black smudges of paint mixed into the base color and swept away by one stroke of the brush. Watson grips the edge of the sharp gray stone and his lungs, they hurt to breathe.

+

What makes Holmes finally go back is the certainty that he can never move on without moving forward; he cannot accept the things he cannot change if he does not face them; and in his heart, of course, is that simplest and most complex of all human emotions, which he has so long told himself he could not feel because it does not make sense and everything must make sense. He _(simply; impossibly)_ wants to see Watson. He needs him.

Finally that, he understands.

He sends one last message to forewarn his coming, this one worded. It says: _December 29. Wait for me._

Or maybe that isn’t what it says. Maybe it reads: _I wanted you to know, Watson. I did not mean for this to happen._

Or perhaps only: _I am sorry for everything._

But in every instance, the message ends:

_Forever yours—  
Holmes_


End file.
